LONDON - The relatives stood in a circle, watching one another amidst the smoked salmon sandwiches of a funeral wake. Brother of the deceased had nearly finished telling a story about how he was so bad at carpentry that he needed his son to help him fit a fridge. The others were preparing their faces for the punchline. So there was laughter at the end, while people quickly moved forward for more tea, but it was not supposed to be funny. He was just letting them know what he was like, in his own nervous way, after three decades away. No-one else in the circle stepped forward to offer a story in response, and he realised that he had adopted Canadian ways of interacting, in his solitude. He fell silent, unable to reach out, and thought of his mother, whose lies had forced him to flee England and leave his sister. Now his childhood companion was an old woman and she had been cremated that morning, leaving him Long Lost Larry.
Her grandchildren were at their ease, joking together about how one cousin who had moved to Australia, but only for fun. Their home soil, England, held the roots of their family heritage, and it gave them confidence. They had not met before, although they lived just 100 miles apart, and now was the time to discover each other, excited by the continents that had pulled their parents' and grandparents' generation apart.
One generation up, brothers and sisters resorted to the languages of their adopted homelands. The Irish discussed pain, the grief and the type of syringes involved in her long, drawn-out illness. They distressed the South Africans, who had been admiring the beautiful garden. Sandwiches were proffered and accepted politely. This despite the sharing of enough genes to give them identical noses and complexions.
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Britain is a country of immigrants: Celts, Romans, Vikings, Normans - they came to conquer new territory and to seize the spoils of war. And they stayed for the tea. In each case, within generations, they were absorbed into the national culture as it emerged around them. There are traces everywhere of the language and customs of the conquerers but, as they lived there, the land slowly, inevitably conquered them.
The British Empire and the potato famines sent them forth again, but they never managed to settle in other lands as others had settled in theirs. The British kept themselves apart, and eventually returned home with their malaria or their medals or their maids. Old Blighty, they called it. Because along with the damp and the mould, the country breeds a familiar affection in people.
They had opened the channels, and emigration became an option for people who needed to start again. And for the family that had been scattered, even shattered, by the expansion of the white world, returning home was a challenge, even if family obstacles were gone. You might know the streets of Cambridge, and have kept your accent, but the country had been transformed.
The absorption process is so quick here that in little over one generation, England has become ethnically diverse and not nearly as class-based as textbooks would have you believe. And yet Brits abroad rarely change. My family represent the time-warp, and when in England, they can sense it. There is nothing to stop them from staying, evolving, and being part of it again, but they would rather be forever an Englishman abroad than risk being an anachronism in their own land. I wish I knew why. Maybe more recent immigrants, returning home after times of change, will feel the same way, and keep their distance.
At the wake, cultural barriers were dissolving, as men and women felt the tug of familiar soil. The family smiled and exchanged email adresses. "Great to meet you at last - let's keep in touch," they said. "Shame it had to be at a funeral." And they rushed to board their separate aeroplanes to places where it didn't hurt so much to be an immigrant whose context had changed. Far from home and stripped of purpose.
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